


violets to bloom at her feet

by shadoedseptmbr



Series: Tales from the Shelterverse [15]
Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Child Death, Death, F/M, Far Future, OC, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-12
Updated: 2014-11-12
Packaged: 2018-02-25 01:53:35
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2604254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shadoedseptmbr/pseuds/shadoedseptmbr
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The best of all possible worlds.  And an ending, of sorts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	violets to bloom at her feet

**Author's Note:**

> All right, the Inquistion is upon us-with all that entails, including completely routing any lasting hold that Steal Away Home had with canon. So have a Tale of the Shelterverse...the best of all possible worlds and an ending, that may yet be. Major character deaths, attempted suicide, and babies ever after.

Luc was forty and Darien and Thena were nearly thirty eight, married and with children of their own, when Sebastian stepped down from the throne and handed the reins over to his second child.  “I should have retired and given the lad the position years ago.”  He gave Alyce, in charge of the Guard, the Starkhaven bow and looked deep into Aeryn’s worried eyes when they returned to their chambers that night.

“I’m a bit past its pull, mo chridhe.  And better to be handed it by me than to for our fierce girl to pick it up from the ground.”

She searched his face and found no conflict there before she whispered “Alright,” softly into his ear and kissed his sharp cheekbone…gone a bit sharper over the winter, she noticed, though his hands were still strong as he held her.

They removed to the Cottage in the Grove that they’d rebuilt, their retreat for decades now, overlooking the fields she’d come to love.  A simpler life, though he was close enough to counsel Darien when their son needed him and to have a dinner or two to keep things smooth with the nobles.  Now and again she would travel to the training grounds to see how Macie was dealing with her scout recruits.

Five summers, four winters.  Aeryn ran the little manse like a top, the gardens swelled around them.  Sebastian grew leaner every year and his shoulders lost their breadth, and the last of the rich russet of his hair turned white as snow but his smile never lost its sweetness even as the nagging cough caught his breath more often.  

They didn’t manage to get to Ferelden that last summer, despite Thena’s open invitation.  Instead, Alyce came to the Cottage to watch her father’s sure, elegant hands fletch.  Darien walked with him along the lanes and set the local ladies aflutter with their combined charms.  Thena brought her hounds to be petted and her children to be spoiled and set the meadow alight with laughter and tricks.  Jace stole in one morning to help his father rebuild a bridge washed away in a spring storm.    

Then came a late spring morning he had to let Aeryn finish planting an ash sapling in the grove when she found him bent over the handle of his spade, hacking.  He sat heavily on the bench they’d placed there to watch the sunrise as she finished his work.  When she sat beside him he tucked a violet from the patch at their feet behind her ear.

Her eyes were fierce when she told him, “I’ll send for Lucky, then.”

“Alright.”  His were soft, the brilliance fading.

Luc visited frequently that last winter, too.  This time he looked deep into Aeryn’s eyes gone sharp and worried.

“I can’t.  Mum…I’m so sorry.”

For just a moment, for the first time in his life, Lucian Vael understood why as much as they loved her, Starkhaven was a little afraid of their Lady.  Her eyes had gone cold as the dragonbone daggers she still carried.  Still and looking up at him, with shadows crawling at her feet, Lucky resisted the urge to put up a shield. This was his mother.

But the moment passed, Aeryn pulled up years of old hard rein and smiled gently at her oldest son, her healer lad, and pushed her silver bangs from her face.  “It’s alright, pup.  He’s had a good life.”  He looked relieved under his sorrow and she squeezed his hand and turned back.

But she went into their room, an airy haven scented with elfroot and soothing cherry bark syrup, and didn’t fool Sebastian at all.

“Come here to me, a ruin.  Did you think I didn’t know?”

Fear poured in to replace the anger that always came first and Aeryn curled into the bed with him and he held her close against his thin chest, long arms wrapping around her own slight figure and her fingers clutched in his linen robe.

“Please…”  He could hear the pain knotting in her throat and prayed for breath enough to tell her again.

“The Maker has blessed me a thousand fold in ways I could never imagine, starting the day you stepped over my threshold.  His blessing does not end here.”  His hand was warm and his palm was soft, though the tips of his fingers still held traces of old callus as he traced the lines of her face, still sweet, though less firm than they’d been forty years ago.  “Don’t be afraid, anam chara.”

She kissed the corner of his lips, tinged a frightening pale blue, and tucked her head under his chin into the hollow of his throat and pressed her lips there, too.  His breath was shallow and she could hear the sinister wheeze that was stealing him from her.  His pulse, though, was steady as ever.  The metronome of her life, the measure of her days.

He whispered something to her in the old language he’d taught her, one lover’s word at a time.  “D’ya believe me?”

“You’ve never given me a reason to doubt.”

“Believe me now, then.”

“I’m trying, love.”

They spent the evening twined together, whispering their lovers’ secrets like the lost children they’d been forty years ago.

His cough quieted and his breathing eased with Luc’s potion and she only closed her eyes for a minute.

He slipped away from her in the night with a smile on his face, as light footed a rogue as he’d ever been.

She stood at his pyre clad in Starkhaven’s sapphires, its gold and white, one final time.  She asked for a moment alone and they left her.  Of course they did.

And when the flames leapt high and every muscle in her body tensed to move, the shadows clinging like a shroud; a lean, strong, brown tattooed hand flared weakly and clasped her wrist.

Fenris frowned at her from beneath his fringe, lines of time and grief around his own eyes.

“He would be ashamed of you.”

“He shouldn’t have left me then.”

Fenris’ expression gentled at the hollow answer. “He would tell you he has just gone to scout the way and make sure the trail is clear for the two of us, wary travelers on the path that we are.  And that you were stronger than he.  He told me once, when Afton died, when you were ill, that he was afraid to live longer than you.”  He watched the frame of the pyre collapse, and wrapped his arm around her waist as a shudder ran through her, “He was afraid of what it would do to him.”

He was unprepared for her eyes filling with tears.  All these years and they still didn’t come easily to her. “Fenris...”

He leaned into her shoulder as her voice broke.  “You aren’t alone, Hawke.”

Aeryn sagged against him and nodded.  “Best get me inside, then.  There’s an antidote in the cider on the mantle.”

Fenris and Bethany took her back to the Cottage and stayed a few nights before Aeryn chased them out the door and back to their vineyards.  She stayed in her woods for the winter and returned to Starkhaven in the spring to welcome a fourth grandson.  She spent the summer, at Luc’s request, in Ferelden with Thena’s brood and their mabari pups.

And if her smile was never as bright again and if she forgot to sing, no one asked her why.  Thena sent her home with enough Andraste’s Grace to fill all the gardens in Starkhaven.

Another three summers passed.  Aeryn split her days between the scout’s training grounds and the farms, but always retreated back to the Cottage.

Luc opened a second Healer’s Hall in Amaranthine training more mages in the Healing arts.  Alyce won the Tourney held in Kirkwall that year and took the cup from Auntie Aveline’s freckled hand.  She’d stepped down as Viscount a few years before, but she was still the city’s bulwark.

Jace came in from the sea on an icy winter’s evening, her baby with Sebastian’s blazing eyes and so little of his gentle heart…too much of me and Carver in him, Aeryn had always thought.  He’d Joined the Wardens a few years ago but was ever her son and occasionally took his wandering feet away.  He found the staff frantic as they hadn’t seen their lady since the night before, only a note saying she’d gone looking for mushrooms in the forest.  She’d left father’s elderly deerhound behind, despite the hound’s normal place at her feet.

After a hunt through the woods, the hounds rarely able to pick up her trail, Jace came across his mother as the sun set, in dark leather and cowl standing on the chalk bluff that overlooked the lavender-banded winter fields.  Stoic and icy eyed when she realized he’d been worried about her.  “I heard your father singing.  I thought I’d have a look.”  Shadows guttering at her feet, again.

“Come in to dinner, Mum?” No one ever able to cow her baby…built like Carver, nearly six and a half feet tall and broad shouldered as an ox, for all that he was a mage with fire racing in his veins.  No one but her.

“Of course.” Her eyes strayed over the fields again, her smile flickering as the wind picked up and ruffled the bangs over her forehead.  

Back at the Cottage, Jace leaned against his companion’s knees as Tyr braided back the hair from his forehead.  “No…something’s wrong.  I’m going to send for Uncle Fenris and Lucky.  They could always talk sense into her, even when Da couldn’t.”

Fenris came, of course, Aunt Bethany in tow.  As did Luc and Alyce.  In order to make it seem natural they arranged for others and made it a party.  Even Darien came in from the city, citing a need to escape the Satinalia nonsense for a few days.

She sat very still while Luc and Bethany examined her; watching them from under her lashes, haughty but cooperative.

She wore grey to dinner as she had for the last three years.  A flowing dress, pinned at her shoulders and she looked ethereal in it, white hair, grey eyes, her figure gone slender and frail with age, but no less regal than when Sebastian had sat on the throne and she stood at his shoulder; the shining cruel blade to his lithe, yielding bow. Starkhaven had loved her because their beloved prince so clearly did, because she had saved them and then because of the children she gave them.  But they never quite breathed easy around her, their Hawke, jessed to them by love.

She and Fenris bent together chuckling low over some bit of foolishness Varric had sent along in the last packet from Nevarre and Jace smirked at the way their hair blended together, now a better matched pair than they’d ever been.

Bethany and Luc were conferring, too.  When Jace asked, Alyce hovering over his shoulder and Darien frowning down at him, Luc shrugged.  “There’s nothing wrong we can find.  Summer was a little hard on her like always.  We should have made her go to Thena’s again.  But she always seems better in the winter.  The cold perks her up a little.”

Aunt Bethany, her hair still dark but for two twining silver streaks shooting back from her forehead and coiled up, smiled just a little wickedly.  “Don’t ever let your mum hear you call her perky, lad.  If she says she heard Sebastian…well…Aeryn hears better than most of us.  Maybe the Maker granted her a boon.”

There was a bit of dancing.  She even took a turn with Fenris and smiled her old wicked smile when Jace played a pirate’s song that Aunt Isabela had taught him, years ago when he’d first run away to the sea, tagging at his cousin Alaine’s heels

Her eyes were still bright and her back still straight as a blade when the rest dragged themselves to bed.

Luc meant to go and check on her, truly.  Mum was as always, a restless sleeper.  But the late hour, the long party and worry had caught him and he slept sounder than was his wont.

Jace, gone down to practice in the ring, found her in the garden the next morning just after sunrise and falling to his knees beside the bench, he bowed his head against her skirts like the little boy he’d never quite let go of being around her.  “Ah, Mum.”

In her flowing grey as if she’d never gone to bed, sitting on the bench and leaning against the wide bole of the oak tree Sebastian had planted the day they were married.  The grove behind them made of smaller trees, chestnuts and rowans, one planted for every child, even Afton, who had died after only a few days of fraught life. There was a new ironwood sapling, slim and strong, for each grandchild; the last planted earlier that fall.  A boy named Sebastian, Darien and Janess’ youngest, his eyes clearing to Vael blue early.

There were the remnants of a sweet smile fading from her face and her eyes were fixed on the blazing horizon, her dragonbone blades clean and laid at her side on the stone bench and crossed with one black stiletto, etched with elvhen runes.  One of Da’s crimson tipped fletching feathers still under her small, slack fingers as others scattered on the ground.

Scattered among the pale blue violets…too early for them, still a trace of frost in the air…blooming at her feet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
